


Through the Fire

by thetransgirlwhoneverwas



Series: Fictober 2019 [6]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-26 06:29:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20925677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thetransgirlwhoneverwas/pseuds/thetransgirlwhoneverwas
Summary: The Doctor and Peri visit a volcano that has been extinct for millennia. Who knows how long it will stay that way.





	Through the Fire

“Look at it, Peri. Magnificent, isn’t it? The splendour of it! The majesty! The sheer contained power in that. It’s the biggest volcano in the entire galaxy, did you know that?”

“Yes, Doctor,” Peri responded, her view of the volcano blocked by the Doctor’s coat that she still found it difficult to draw her eyes away from. “You said it several times in the TARDIS, and several times on the walk here.”

“Well, it’s a fact worth celebrating,” the Doctor retorted. “It isn’t every day you see the biggest volcano in the galaxy, is it? How marvelous. Extinct now, of course, but think of the raw force it once contained! Think of how the entire planet’s ecosystem could change on a whim when it erupted. Let me tell you, this planet has gone through so many different ages and so many different environments because of this one volcano changing everything just as easy as you or I would sneeze!”

“So...it’s not going to erupt anytime soon?” Peri asked apprehensively.

“Oh, no, most certainly not, at this point in time it’s been extinct for thousands of years, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands,” the Doctor tried to reassure her, naturally adding in far more words than strictly necessary. “A very good thing too, if it erupted now it could destroy the entire civilisation that these people have developed, and what a lovely civilisation it is.”

“They’re certainly big on their guided tours,” Peri remembered how many vendors in the village they walked from were offering to take them deeper into the volcano than anyone else dared go, and that vendor over there boasting about how deep she would take you was lying, and that vendor boasting about how deep xe would take you would trick you into thinking you were deeper than you were, and that vendor boasting about how deep he would take you would steal your money and throw you into it, so certainly don’t go to him, absolutely not, and suddenly Peri realised that the Doctor had started talking again and she hadn’t been listening to a word of it.

“-why it became extinct, you see, which as I believe I mentioned is very good because an eruption would completely destroy any semblance of civilisation here, which we absolutely cannot have because this place is just so lovely and-”

The volcano erupted.

Peri heard a roar like a hundred jet engines igniting at once, and one of the three suns she could see was blocked from the sky entirely by the cloud of ash blasted into the atmosphere, swiftly followed by a stream of lava that glowed and sparkled impressively in the shadow cast by the ash as it incinerated the system of bridges and walkways in the mouth. Peri couldn’t hold back a short scream as the plume of magma soared into the sky before it began to fall down the side of the no longer extinct volcano.

“WHAT?” the Doctor turned to face the volcano which now had lava running down the side horrifyingly quickly. “B-but how? The volcano has been extinct for millions of years, how can this-”

“Doctor!” Peri grabbed the Doctor’s attention. “Was there anyone inside the volcano?”

The Doctor took a deep breath very quickly and gathered himself. “If there was, there’s nothing we can do for them now. Now, we have to evacuate as many people as we ca-”

He stopped, looked around, and if Peri didn’t know better she’d have said he sniffed at the air.

“There’s someone here,” he said, in a tone that Peri found uncomfortably ominous. Before she had a chance to ask him to clarify, someone else came running up. A young looking woman with dark skin, dark hair tied up in a frizzy ponytail, a dark leather jacket, dark leather boots that reached up to her knees, and a dark bangle on her wrist, but her eyes sparkled with life. She stopped in front of them, took a moment to admire the Doctor’s jacket, and grinned.

“My word, it’s even worse than I imagined, I love it!”

“You,” the Doctor looked straight at her. “You’re a Time Lady. Did Gallifrey send you after me? Hmm?”

“Me? From Gallifrey? Nooooo, no no no, absolutely not!” she seemed rather offended by the idea. “I’m a renegade, like you! I’ve always wanted to meet you, I’ve heard so much about the infamous Doctor.”

“You have?” the Doctor let himself be flattered for a moment before remembering the erupting volcano. “Who are you?”

“Oh, I never said who I was, so sorry, getting carried away,” the Time Lady said, talking almost faster than Peri could process her words. “I’m the Rider. We seem to have an exploding volcano on our hands.”

“And a civilisation about to be wiped out by it, unless we can stop it,” the Doctor agreed.

“Can we?” Peri asked. “Stop the volcano, I mean?”

The Rider looked at her, and Peri saw something she didn’t like in her eyes. Disdain? No, she thought, not quite. Condescension.

“I’m not sure we can stop it, not without being able to spread something very precisely very quickly-” the Doctor started, but was interrupted by the Rider.

“Okay, but say we could, what would we need to do that?” she inquired, still talking almost too fast to keep up with.

The Doctor blinked. “I mean, hypothetically, if we had some liquid ignipyolium, we could in theory use it to flash freeze the end of the lava flow, let it pile up and keep freezing and create a wall that the rest of the lava couldn’t get through, but even if we had enough we wouldn’t be able to- look, shouldn’t we be focused on evacuating everyone?”

But the Rider only snapped her fingers, gesturing the revelation the Doctor had given her with her hand. “Of course! Liquid ignipyolium, oh, you’re just as good as they say, Doctor! Back in a tick!”

“Where-” the Doctor and Peri started in unison, but before they had a chance to finish their question the Rider had clutched bangle on her wrist and disappeared.

“A Time Ring?” the Doctor asked nobody incredulously. “Why does she need one of those? Doesn’t she have a TARDIS?”

“I do indeed!” came a voice from above them. Peri looked up and decided that nothing else could surprise her today. Above them was the Rider atop a mechanical horse, larger by half than any horse Peri had seen on Earth or not, with huge wings and more jets and rockets than she thought strictly necessary, a metal water tank attached haphazardly to the back and leaking vapour.

“Here we go!” the Rider shouted, pushing the solid reins forward as the horse accelerated past them and galloped towards the volcano, speed augmented by the various rockets blasting fire behind it. As the horse reached the air above the edge of the lava flow, the Doctor and Peri watched in awe as it changed direction faster than the laws of physics should have allowed, and began tracing the edge of the lava, dropping huge amounts of the blue liquid from the tank that could not possibly contain that much of it. Half of the liquid evaporated before it ever reached the ground, but what did had exactly the desired effect: the edge of the lava flow froze in an instant, the lava behind it sliding on top of it and freezing the moment it did, until the wall of frozen lava was too high for the lava to go anywhere. The Rider on her mechanical horse made a complete loop around the volcano, creating a solid wall around the lava flow and connecting the ends, before turning impossibly again and heading straight for the centre of the volcano, dropping the entire tank of whatever liquid ignipyolium was left straight into the still erupting volcano. It froze the lava in a vertical plume as it dropped, and not five seconds after it disappeared, the roaring stopped and the volcano was dormant once again, this time with a single shaft of molten rock jutting out of the centre.

The Rider came to a halt in front of them and dismounted her horse.

“Wow!” Peri couldn’t stop herself exclaiming.

The Rider shot her a patronising look before turning her attention back to the Doctor. “You were right, it worked just as we hoped, good suggestion Doctor!”

The Doctor stood up a little straighter and puffed out his chest a little further. “Well, I’m not just a pretty face, you know. You were rather impressive yourself, where did you get that vehicle?”

The Rider just winked, and turned back to admire her handiwork at the volcano.

“Oh, yes! That looks amazing! That’ll be a monument to what we did here forever! Incredible work! What a piece of art!”

The Doctor beamed a little brighter.

“And to think I almost didn’t set the volcano off. Ha!”

The Doctor’s smile snapped into a frown. “What.”

The Rider turned to face him again. “I know! What was I thinking, I’m so glad I did it though, what a spectacle!”

“YOU set the volcano off?” the Doctor demanded.

“How could you?” Peri followed.

“Oh, shut up,” the Rider snapped at Peri, and turned to the Doctor yet again. “Of course I set it off. I wanted to see what would happen, I wanted to see what we could do together, and what an amazing piece it was! What an adventure! What a story!”

“And what, pray tell, if we hadn’t managed to stop the flow?” the Doctor was growing more and more angry now.

The Rider shrugged in response. “Then we would have left in our TARDISes, no harm done.”

“B-b-but what about the people?” the Doctor spluttered in indignation. “You would have just left them to die.”

“Well, yes,” the Rider responded with disturbing casualness. “Oh, but that would have been quite the story too! The largest volcano in the galaxy, dormant for millions of years, suddenly erupts and destroys the entire civilisation, oh, they’d be investigating for eons, what a mystery!”

“But the people!” the Doctor repeated. “You would have killed them all!”

The Rider looked unconcerned. “Doctor, these creatures, they are caught in the Web of Time, their lives already written. But us, we exist outside, we spin that very web. Surely it is our right, our duty even, to serve them as best we can. And what better can we do for these fleeting creatures but to make them part of the greatest epics the universe has ever seen?”

“That’s why you did it?” the Doctor challenged. “That’s why you risked death and destruction on an unimaginable scale? For _fun_?”

“Oh, no no no, so much more than mere fun, Doctor,” the Rider answered. “For glory! For grandeur! For the sheer, pure drama of it!”

Peri had rarely seen this Doctor speechless, but he said nothing. His face simply scrunched with rage at the uncaring figure in front of him.

“And oh, it was so very dramatic, wouldn’t you say?” the Rider didn’t seem to notice the Doctor’s fury. Either that, or she didn’t care. “Anyway, must be off. See you again, Doctor! I can’t wait to make more stories with you!”

The Doctor lunged forward to grab her, stop her from getting away, but she danced out of his reach, ran away from them and leapt aboard her horse. As she pulled the reins upwards, the horse lifted from the ground. The Rider pushed a button and thrust the reins forwards, the horse soaring into the distance as a weezing, groaning sound emanated from it, and it slowly faded from view.

“Unbelievable,” the Doctor shook his head. “Simply unbelievable. The nerve of that rogue, I simply cannot believe!”

“We’re going to run into her again, aren’t we, Doctor?” Peri asked.

“Oh, inevitably,” he responded, not sounding happy about the prospect. “I daresay we most likely will be seeing a lot of her, and who knows what she might do next?”


End file.
